Woodcut from Camille Flammarion’s 1888 book L’Atmosphère: météorologie populaire.
Perhaps there are people who are not afraid to make mistakes. I think they are in the minority. Are you one? Well, I'm certainly not one of them. The mismatch between reality and my expectations often hits me like a punch in the gut.
It is normal to experience negative emotions in this case. After all, a mistake can mean anything. At best, it is just a slight miscalculation. At worst, you don't understand anything at all in this life. No wonder the amygdala paralyzes your brain with anxiety - potentially every mistake invites chaos inside, like a crack in the bottom of a ship. In other words, a mistake symbolizes death.
That's why man so desperately wants to always and in everything to be right. Even smashing his face in blood against the iron barrier of facts that prove to him that in reality the opposite is true. It's an understandable but naive idea: "I'll survive if I never leave the safe nest."
And that would be a great solution, if the world around us remained static. But the context is transforming, reborn and transformed, and it seems to be transforming faster and faster every day. A tree that has held the family nest for decades falls from old age. The river floods the cozy hole where several generations have grown up.
In addition to changes outside, invisible changes are constantly taking place inside each person. In one moment, hormones and a desire to change the world awaken, in another - the desire to have children and build their own business, in the third - the urge to contemplate the turbulent flow of life. Because of the inevitable metamorphosis inside, it becomes unbearable for us to breathe, like a crab in an old shell. By doing nothing, we only make ourselves worse off. It turns out that when we dare to do something, we make mistakes and suffer. Refraining from action is illusory, for in the long run it also means a dead end. So here is another existential dilemma.
The way out, as usual, is paradoxical. Contrary to spasms of anxiety, it makes sense to try to be wrong more often. Ideally, dozens or even hundreds of times every single day. A deadly poison in a small dose becomes a safe or even a cure. In the same way, dangerous mistakes, when broken down to elementary particles, become valuable bytes of information. Voluntarily seeking out and making sense of such knowledge allows us to create a defense against truly dangerous catastrophes.
But most importantly, mistakes thus transformed open the door to a new world. By our willingness to endure anxiety, it is as if we are buying a call option at an affordable price. It entitles us to upside, that is, to the unlimited potential for development, prosperity, and growth. That sounds like a great deal to me. What do you think?
Yours sincerely,
-Alexander
Kyiv, 09.04.2022
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As a business therapist, I help tech founders radically increase the value of their companies by accelerating key decisions at the intersection of business and personality.